“The leader takes care of the group”
Sometimes the one leading is the one walking at the back
Some of the old stories have a thing about looking back. Lot’s wife turns to see the burning city she’s leaving behind and becomes a pillar of salt. Orpheus, almost out of the underworld, turns to check that Eurydice is still there and loses her all over again. Apparently, there are consequences to turning around.
But I’ve been thinking about another kind of looking back. The kind that makes sure the people coming along behind you are doing all right.
At the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics JFK Jr. Forum, Keri Russell said something that followed me home and has been keeping me company on my morning walks ever since. The leader takes care of the group.
Seven simple and kind words. I keep noodling them over in my walks, wondering what they might mean beyond the usual places we look for leadership.
If you’ve hiked with a group, you know the person at the back. She may not reach the summit first, but she knows who’s still on the trail. She notices when someone falls behind, when a conversation goes quiet, when the pace that felt perfectly reasonable to some has become a bit much for someone else. She adjusts. She waits. She makes sure everyone gets there.
I’m interested in what it means to grow older, and what we might have to offer now that we didn’t have at thirty or forty. What is leadership at this age? I’m sixty-four, and I’ve spent a lot of time walking and thinking. The years have taught me a few things, including how much I still have to learn. I hope I’ve gained a little patience, a better sense of when to speak and when to listen, and some willingness to let another person set the pace.
I’m still working on all three.
Lately, I’ve been reading about elephant matriarchs. Older females draw on years of experience to help their families recognize familiar calls and respond to danger. They carry knowledge the younger elephants haven’t had time to acquire. I find this fascinating. All those years spent living, watching, remembering. Experience becomes something the whole family can draw upon.
I wonder what we humans might do with our accumulated years if we thought of them less as something to preserve and more as something to share.
There’s a job description for getting older that I don’t remember seeing in any brochure. It involves knowing when to speak up and when to make room. When to offer what you’ve learned and when to admit you haven’t a clue. When to keep moving and when to recognize that somebody else might need a little more time.
This feels more interesting than the usual conversation about aging, which seems to involve an awful lot of discussion about what we should be buying, lifting, smoothing, or trying to pass for. Staying healthy and strong matters, of course. So do the classes still waiting to be taken and the places still waiting to be seen. But another possibility keeps tugging at my sleeve. What if the years are quietly preparing us for a particular kind of leadership, one that only experience can teach? By now we have been the one who fell behind, the one who needed help and was too proud to ask, the one who got lost and found the way back. That history is a kind of wisdom. It teaches you what struggling looks like from the outside, how to spot it in someone else before they say a word. Among elephants, the herd follows its oldest female, because she remembers where the water is in a dry year and which sounds mean danger. Maybe growing older offers us something similar. A chance to become the person at the back of the line who has walked this trail before, who notices, who waits, who makes sure everyone gets home.
I say this as someone who can still be impatient. I like to get places. I have been known to walk ahead while continuing a conversation with someone who is now several yards behind me. Apparently, I can deliver an entire monologue to the back of another person’s head without noticing.
There is room for improvement.
Still, I know the feeling when someone waits for me. Not fussing or assuming I can’t manage, just quietly adjusting their pace. They make room for me without making a thing of it. I feel cared for, and I find myself wanting to extend that same courtesy to someone else.
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Maybe that’s the difference between looking back because we cannot let go of what’s behind us and turning around because we want to know who’s still there. One keeps us fixed on what we’ve lost. The other helps us take care of what we have.
I think about the people who do this every day, often without calling it anything at all. The friend who remembers to call. The person who notices you’ve gone quiet and asks a second question, the one that gives you permission to tell the truth. Someone who waits by the car because they know you’re still tying your boots. A colleague who sees that you’re overwhelmed and offers to take something off your hands.
These gestures rarely announce themselves. They are easy to overlook because they don’t come with a podium or a microphone or line on a CV. But they change how it feels to move through the world. They remind us that we are not required to manage everything alone.
I spent more than thirty years working in advertising, with creative teams and trying to make good things with other people. When I think about the moments that mattered most, I don’t think first about the big pitches or the work that won awards. I remember the people who noticed when someone was struggling. The ones who asked how your mother was doing after surgery, who stayed late to help, who said, “Go home. I’ve got this.”
The work mattered, of course. But the care made it possible to do the work together.
I’m grateful for the people who have offered me that kind of care, especially the ones who did it so naturally that I might not have understood what they were giving me until much later. I hope I’ve managed to do some of the same for others, though I’m sure there are plenty of moments when I was too busy looking ahead to notice what was happening beside me.
Walking has given me fourteen years to think about these things, one morning at a time. It has taught me to pay attention to the weather, the changing light, the small lives moving through the grass. It has also given me countless chances to notice the people around me, and to remember that everyone is walking through something I may know nothing about.
I still want to see what’s around the next bend. There are books to write, places to visit, skills I haven’t the faintest idea how to acquire. I hope that appetite never leaves me. I like being a beginner. I like the feeling of discovering how little I know.
But I’m beginning to think that the years might also be asking something else of us. To use what we’ve learned with a little more generosity. To make room for someone else’s uncertainty. To remember that being the first to arrive is only one way of getting somewhere.
Perhaps the person at the back of the group has something to teach the rest of us. She sees what the faster walkers might miss and knows that a group is only as far along as the people still making their way up the trail.
Perhaps leadership, in its simplest form, is the willingness to turn around and look. Who needs a cute snack? Who could use a warm hand? Who needs us to move at a different pace?
I don’t have this figured out. I’m trying to pay better attention, to be a little less concerned with pace and a little more aware of the people sharing the path.
Because nobody gets there alone. And some days, the most useful thing we can do is make sure nobody has to walk the hard part by themselves.
Leadership might be the oldest form of care there is.
Libby DeLana is an executive creative director with an explorer’s heart. She writes about walking, cold water, and the small rituals that make a life feel awake. Her books, Do Walk and Cold Joy, are companions for anyone who likes a little adventure in their days. You can find her on Instagram @thismorningwalk, @thiscoldjoy, and @parkhere. You can find Cold Joy at thiscoldjoy.com.
